


Altogether Elsewhere

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bonds, Dystopia, Dystopian Yule, Gifts, Love, Marriage, Seasons, Wilderness, genius, us against the world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-19
Updated: 2013-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-05 05:04:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1089932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nearly Yule. Deserted. Murder.</p>
<p>Do you trust me. Do you love me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Altogether Elsewhere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greenjudy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenjudy/gifts).



> For [greenjudy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/greenjudy), who gave me feral cities.  
> And [Jude](http://archiveofourown.org/users/wiggleofjudas), always the wild.  
> Thank you to [PFG](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart) for all the love.

The sky is leaden, the gulls at eye-level. London’s been half-wild some time now, at first concealing it, in foxes, in wild dogs on the Tube, in fish-glints on the Thames, and then flaunting it, in the decay, the winding of foreign foot-a-night up through Tower Bridge, the licked lapse of the Ravensbourne at twilight.

Nearly Christmas. Frost-fringe on the leaves. The spines of animals splinter along the ridged roofs. Blackbirds a funeral bloom in the gutters. The buildings howl their lostness, their dust, the crumbling of their cornices. Sherlock Holmes might howl with them, could he, their constant companion, guardian, finder of lost things.

Baker’s an oasis, shuttered and bolted and opened now, for the lawless and law alike, a little shop of black-market deduction.

“Hasn’t it always been,” Sherlock jokes, eyebrows rib-vault in his white face.

John puts down the second-to-last of the tea, looks anxious out at the flat grey.

It’ll snow.

*****

Lestrade was sweeping out the Met the other day, disguised. Coppers aren’t safe, he says, most are long gone to the country, to holes they never thought they’d go to. Left what they swore to protect.

Sherlock gave him back his warrant card.

He gave Sherlock a silver key.

_Who stays to keep the city._

“You do,” John says to Sherlock, “you always did.”

“In spirit,” Sherlock says.

Mycroft says the British government lives; it lives in safehouses, Parliament shuttered, bunched on the slick river like hives, haunted.

*****

No fairy lights.

Creeping out in their dark John thinks of Afghan beetles, darklings, scuttling, an old war not forgotten. Sherlock flaps next to him, pursued at the mouth by little brigands of doubt. Accipiter, quick hawk, darting amongst the flares. He is as it suits him, as it suits, strangely as he’s always been.

John carries his gun, always, kilogram-heavy, more than twice a heart.

“You there,” a man calls from shadow, eyes narrow on the curl of Sherlock’s wrist, the way his body aligns with John’s. It’s cold. Glove shoved up. Fine hairs standing up round the band Sherlock wears there, silver ring, wrist-fitted. A gift.

“Don’t even think it.” A shift of John’s weight and the man's gone, the street theirs again, huffing like a hound in wary welcome.

Not always that easy. The other day a broken wrist. A howl from the building next. A neck pressed to pavement by a boot. Sherlock’s fierce eyes. My territory. My _place._

They went to Molly after to wash off the blood. There are still dead to tend. Always more. She keeps the door locked, blinks beautiful in the greenlight, says her flat’s safe, still full of what she is.

“Which is? "

“Come over and see some time.” She smells of good English lavender, limestone and lab.

John’s given her a gun, one he found, which fell into his hands as a building howled, a window cracked.

*****

There’s a case. Jewelry, kept aside, hidden against the drought. There’s another. Stragglers duck into Baker with trouble and lies, foil-wrapped, for the man who holds the key, who walks with the city not at his heels.

John’s always known how to scavenge; Sherlock gathers dinner like evidence, scrapes up what they can't escape from. Fires burn under the bridges. Elsewhere, bats. The wild that will take them.

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Hudson says, “another day.” The sun goes down red as ribbon, shredded.

“Will it get worse?”

“No,” Sherlock says, presses into her palm the last of today’s tea, the last leaves until tomorrow. Sugar, if they can get it, crystal on the whiskers of wildcats.

Not worse now, John thinks, just different, just what, in some sense, it’s always been.

“We can’t lose what we’re smart enough to find,” Sherlock says. He trembles with it, sometimes, the not-worry. Not easy to run your hands down the spine of an animal, John thinks.

They do it anyway.

*****

Another year.

_Has it been some time, London, since you trusted, since you curled back, dipped your head, cocked it, ducked it, rolled belly-up for anyone, anyone… edging back towards what you came from, crying._

They look out over their city in the cold, call to it.

_Do you trust me. Do you love me._ No answer. A palm lipped in caution. A howl.

Sherlock plays in the evenings still. Elegiac thing of elegiac things. Vine twines the strings, wraps the case. His smile is heartbreak whiskylaced. A fierceness.

They bolt the door. There’s still power. It glows, crackles, flickers; candles sometimes. Shells. Water.

How long will it last.

*****

Nearly Yule. Deserted. Murder.

“Thought it would be worse,” Sherlock says. There’s ice in his lashes.

No-one to solve it for but he does anyway. Finds clues in the small green things, the berry red that leaps from keyholes, little mouths.

There are answers in the small pains, the creak of springs, all the human and animal lost, the way the night still falls.

Sherlock brings home the last crust of something sweet.

We’re _alive, alive_. Stand guard while the city growls.

There’s a photo pinned to their wall: Sussex. A field blank with snow.

“Happy Christmas, John,” Sherlock says.

John sees weather, hears a buzzing at the edge of it.

John sets a hand to his gift, the wrist, the brushed band.

Feels the wildness leaping there.

"Happy Christmas, Sherlock," he says.

*****

At night, first flakes falling, they curl like the last spirits to leave, back to back as they’ve always been, wintered, held quiet over their howling city, the first in spring to welcome it back.

**Author's Note:**

> [Foot-a-night-vine](http://faculty.ucc.edu/biology-ombrello/POW/kudzu.htm)
> 
>  
> 
>  Altogether elsewhere, vast  
> Herds of reindeer move across  
> Miles and miles of golden moss,  
> Silently and very fast. --W.H. Auden, "The Fall of Rome"


End file.
